I can’t say too much lest I breach Little Bookworm’s privacy, but suffice it to say that, after only two weeks at her Obscenely Expensive Liberal Arts College, she has already taken a giant step in the direction of moronic, damaging Leftism. I have refrained from berating her because that would be counterproductive. Instead, I provided her with objective information about the direction she has taken and she, with all the confident arrogance of an uninformed youngster, has refused to reconsider. I’m not feeling the love today.

I hope blogging helps me vent my spleen. Otherwise, if you read tomorrow that a woman suffered a deadly attack of spontaneous combustion during the night . . . well, that just might be me.

Preachy Leftist “comedians” may be harming Hillary. Mr. Bookworm adored Jon Stewart and was endlessly certain that, if I just sat and watched for a while, I’d be riotously amused and return to the Democrat fold. His confidence in Stewart’s powers of persuasion was misplaced. I found Stewart intentionally both ill-informed and dishonest.

When Stewart resigned, Mr. Bookworm transferred his allegiance to John Oliver and Samantha Bee, both of whom are even harder Left than Stewart, and both of whom have the same shtick: They say something insulting about a Republican or conservative, following it with a strained analogy, and then pause for the adoring audience’s laughter. It’s like a call-and-repeat in the Church of Leftism.

Mr. Bookworm has suggested that I lack a sense of humor, which may well be true. I prefer a bit of wit and intelligence to flavor political insults, so I’m probably expecting too much from the current generation of humorists. I, on the other hand, have tried suggesting to him that these smug Leftist harridans simply aren’t funny.

The culture industry has always tilted leftward, but the swing toward social liberalism among younger Americans and the simultaneous surge of activist energy on the left have created a new dynamic, in which areas once considered relatively apolitical now have (or are being pushed to have) an overtly left-wing party line.

[snip]

First, within the liberal tent, they have dramatically raised expectations for just how far left our politics can move, while insulating many liberals from the harsh realities of political disagreement in a sprawling, 300-plus million person republic. Among millennials, especially, there’s a growing constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or triggering, left-wing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.

Thus Clinton’s peculiar predicament. She has moved further left than any modern Democratic nominee, and absorbed the newer left’s Manichaean view of the culture war sufficiently that she finds herself dismissing almost a quarter of the electorate as “irredeemable” before her donors. Yet she still finds herself battling an insurgency on her left flank, and somewhat desperately pitching millennials on her ideological bona fides.

Isn’t that just delicious? All I can say is, from Douthat’s essay to God’s ear.

The older of my two dogs is very high-strung and she got so frightened by the wind that carried the fog in tonight that I’ve had to sequester her and me in my home office so that Mr. Bookworm, who needs to get up for work tomorrow, can sleep. She shows no signs of settling, so I’m blogging.

No matter how you slice it, Trump is the less risky gamble. Writing in the Claremont Review of Books, Publius Decius Mus quite graphically presents the issue that I have been arguing all summer:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

Precisely. Trump, with all his flaws, is better than Hillary. Up until a few months ago, one could argue that Hillary is just another garden-variety Leftist and that the American republic will survive despite her.

That’s all changed now. Knowing as we do of her extraordinary corruption — whether in running the State Department as a Pay-for-Play profit center for herself, her husband, and her daughter, or deliberately exposing all of America’s state secrets to try to hide her gross malfeasance — electing her to the presidency means that America has fully embraced banana republic status.

In the wake of a Hillary victory, thanks to Comey and the American voters (including all those #NeverTrumpers), there will no longer be a rule of law in America that applies equally to all citizens. We will in one fell swoop have destroyed a legal system that goes back 1215 when England first put into writing in the Magna Carta a policy saying that no one, not even a king, is above the law. As of now, Hillary and her cronies are above the law and it will be a disaster if the American people put their imprimatur on that utterly corrupt, anti-democratic principle.

One more thing: As Publius Decius Mus explains, Hillary’s been wrong about every single policy stance she’s ever taken (including the ones where she’s changed her stance repeatedly according to the latest poll data), while Trump, in his fumbling, bumbling way, has been right about all of the most important policy issues facing America. So maybe he’s not so bad after all.

The migraine is fading, helped by a surprise three-hour nap, and my energy is returning. Yay!!! Now I can blog:

Was losing good for Ted Cruz? I was really in it to win it for Ted Cruz. I continue to think he is the most principled conservative in American politics. But was that principled stand his Achilles heel? Peter Weber argues that, if nominated, Ted Cruz had only two choices, neither good: Be principled and lose, or abandon his principles . . . and still lose, because then he wouldn’t be Ted Cruz.

Me? I still would have preferred Ted Cruz who actually is what Trump pretends to be — a game changer destroying the entrenched Washington way of doing things.

The empty Palestinian museum is an apt metaphor for the Palestinian cause. Daniel Greenfield finds a useful metaphor in the expensive, empty building meant to commemorate the “Palestinian” people:

Although the question of Muslim refugees is no longer front page news, the Left is still keeping up the relentless drumbeat that those of us who oppose unfettered Syrian and Islamic immigration into America are racist, “Islamophobic,”* and unconstitutional. We’re told it’s wrong of us to judge the many by the bad actions of a few and that we’re running counter to our legal system’s insistence that people are innocent until proven guilty.

This is misdirection. We are not as a nation trying to obtain a criminal conviction against today’s immigrant because of a specific terrorist act committed by yesterday’s immigrant. Instead, we are engaging in intelligent risk analysis which is consistent with American law and tradition, with sanity, and with national survival. We aren’t doing anything that shames us.

That we shouldn’t be embarrassed hasn’t stopped the Left, of course, I keep seeing posts and articles by or about this good Muslim or that group of good Syrian Muslims. Today’s example, from the WaPo, is about Syrian refugees in England who helped out when floods hit:

According to reports in the Guardian newspaper and elsewhere, a group of Syrian refugees has been working in Littleborough, Greater Manchester, shoveling sand into sandbags to help avert more flooding.

“We saw the pictures on TV and wanted to help,” Yasser al-Jassem, a 35-year-old teacher, told the Guardian, adding that the people of Greater Manchester had been good to him and others in his group and that they wanted to help in response.

Good for those guys! That’s precisely what people who have been given refuge in another land should be doing. I wish all of them were moved by that spirit of gratitude. I’d love to see thousands of stories precisely like that one.

In addition to the “watch these Muslims being good citizens” stories, I also keep seeing posts and articles in which Muslims state “I, personally, am a good person, so you need to get off my back and start using my example as a reason to stop judging all Muslims as potential terrorists.” The most recent example of that phenomenon, again from the WaPo, was the stridently self-righteous post from Rana Elmir, the deputy director of the Michigan chapter of the ACLU, saying that she is not her Muslim brother’s keeper:

I’ve come across a few fascinating and delightful things and am tossing into this Bookworm Beat both posts and pictures:

A study about Palestinian violence explains the “lone wolf” syndrome

Every time Muslims commit mass murder in America, our elites in the Obama administration and the media (but I repeat myself) tell us that it’s not jihad, it’s just a “lone wolf.” What these great Progressive thinkers mean, of course, is that the acts are not being committed by a member of a formal army, receiving orders from a central command. Their logic is that, if there’s no central command point, there’s no jihad; there are just a few wacky individuals who happened to be in touch with overseas terrorist masterminds, who were recognized by all as a devout Muslim (although this devotion was often of recent vintage), and who somehow managed to throw a few “Allahu Akbars” into the carnage.

Israel, of course, has lately had a plague of “lone wolf” “lone wolf attacks,” often by teens and women, none of whom are taking direct marching orders from command central in either Hamas or the PA. Daniel Polisar did a study about Palestinian violence against Jews and he distilled the results of his long-term study to examine the current “lone wolf,” knife-stabbing. What Polisar discovered is that these “lone wolves” aren’t really alone at all. That is, they’re not aberrant outliers. Instead, they are reflecting the central tenets of their society and acting on the dominant paradigm in their community. In their world, it’s praiseworthy to kill Jews, both because Palestinian society at large says that Jews deserve to die and because the same society says that each Jewish death advances Palestinian social and political goals.

In other words, once a society has embraced a corrupt idea, “command central” is no longer necessary to take practical steps to advance that idea. Instead, each individual appoints himself as a soldier in a very real, albeit unstructured, army.

Inspired by Marie Kondo’s advice that true organization begins with throwing out everything that is neither useful nor sentimental, I am continuing to plow through every nook and cranny in my house. This is the first organization system that’s made sense to me, which is why I haven’t already given up and relapsed into my usual vaguely tidy-looking mess. My mind is also a vaguely tidy-looking mess, but it’s still yielded these interesting links:

Ignore people who tell you Cruz is divisive and uncooperative

According to those rooting for candidates other than Ted Cruz, he’s an arrogant blowhard who won’t play well with others. In fact, Cruz’s work history proves that the opposite is true:

At the FTC, Cruz’s agenda could have been written by Milton Friedman.

Cruz promoted economic liberty and fought government efforts to rig the marketplace in favor of special interests. Most notably, Cruz launched an initiative to study the government’s role in conspiring with established businesses to suppress e-commerce. This initiative ultimately led the U.S. Supreme Court to open up an entire industry to small e-tailers. Based on his early support of disruptive online companies, Cruz has some grounds to call himself the “Uber of American politics.”

Moreover, and perhaps surprising to some, Cruz sought and secured a broad, bipartisan consensus for his agenda. Almost all of Cruz’s initiatives received unanimous support among both Republicans and Democrats.

Ted Cruz a consensus-builder? He was, at the FTC.

Read the rest here. Cruz has the chops to make the best kind of President: True conservative values, love for America, phenomenal intelligence, and the ability to work and play well with others.

It’s not a very deep dive to plumb the depths of Leftist intellectual positions on most issues, but it’s still a worthwhile exercise to expose the fallacies that they use to try to dominate the debate on pressing issues — with the most pressing issue being whether to admit Syrian refugees. The easiest place for me to find examples of Leftist thought is my Facebook feed. Because I’ve spent my life in Blue enclaves, almost all of my friends — and they are really nice people in day-to-day interactions — are Progressives. It gives me pleasure to deconstruct some of their more foolish or vicious posters:

I have to admit that these first two posters are my favorite “stupid Progressive Facebook” posts. Because Thanksgiving is coming up, both chide anti-refugee conservatives for forgetting that the first Thanksgiving came about because the indigenous people in North America extended a welcoming hand to European immigrants.

Whenever I’ve seen one of these posters pop up on my Facebook feed, I’ve left a polite comment to the effect that we all learned in public school (thanks to Howard Zinn and others) that the Europeans, once having gotten a foothold in North America, promptly turned around and murdered as many Native Americans as possible. If they couldn’t murder them, they dispossessed them of their land and otherwise marginalized them. There’s certainly a lesson to be learned here but the lesson isn’t to welcome refugees, it’s to cry out “For God’s sake, don’t let them in!”

My Progressive Facebook friends have received their marching orders from Democrat central and the result has been a cascade of stupid cluttering up my Facebook feed. (This is the curse of a life spent living in Blue zones.) Lest I say something unforgivable to people whose good will I need in order for my children and me to get through our daily lives, I’m venting my spleen here.

I’ll start with my own Congressman, Jared Huffman, who is more than adequately filling Lynn Woolsey’s shoes, since she’s hard Left and not very bright:

If you’ll bear with me, let me just break out the problems with that self-congratulatory paragraph:

Ignoring the ad hominem attack with which Huffman begins his post, let’s get to the “factual statements.” First, he says that “[t]hese people [are] overwhelmingly women and children. . . .” Really? That’s not what the demographics in Europe were. In Europe, according to the UN, a source I’m sure Huffman trusts implicitly, the fleeing refugees were overwhelmingly men: In the beginning, the UN was reporting that 72% of the refugees were men. That number has since dropped to 62%, although I have to admit that I don’t trust the UN not to have fiddled with the numbers after the outcry about a huge tide of military-aged Muslim men swarming Europe. So no, if Europe is anything to go by, we’re not getting the widows and orphans. We’re getting the fighting men.

I haven’t had a chance to get much writing done today, but a friend who knows what interests me sent me such a chock-full-of-information email that I’m just going to pass it on to you.

Well, the gossip mags have been talking for two weeks about some male star HIV positive. Turns out it is Charlie Sheen. I don’t wish that on anyone, but color me not surprised. But here is the kicker: If rumors are true he has known for four years, during which time he has had unprotected sex with who knows how many women without warning them of his condition. He is concerned about his condition coming to light because he worries it will “hurt his career.” Lock him up, toss in a couple of starving honey badgers, then throw away the key.

Anti-Islamist protests are occurring all over France. Not exactly a surprise. What I do find curious is that they tag the protesters and Marine La Pen as “far right wing.” There is nothing “right wing” or conservative about her. She is a socialist and a nationalist. Honestly, even before people retake their countries in Europe, they need to burn down the press.

I listened to a Trump rally on the radio as I drove to the store to pick up some milk earlier. For the better part of 20 mins I heard him talk about how great he was going to make things, how the press hates him, and how wonderful he is. The guy could not be more superficial. He makes my skin crawl at this point. Anyone who is buying this travesty is our version of a 2008 Obama voter. I weep for our nation.

Appearing at the G-20 summit in Turkey, President Obama made appropriate noises about responding to ISIS in the wake of the violent attack in Paris on November 13, just two weeks after ISIS shot down a Russian passenger aircraft over the Sinai Desert, killing all aboard.

Obama murmured about an “attack on the civilized world” and spoke poetically about “skies [that] have been darkened.” He promised to stand with France in addressing the savage attack. To date, that promise meant that the U.S. shared with France data about ISIS strongholds in Syria.

Yesterday, using this data, France obliterated ISIS’s Raqqa command center, recruiting center, and ammunition storage. Interestingly, despite the U.S. having possession of this information, and indeed, using it for an expensive surgical strike against “Jihadi John,” our military made no effort to take out these same targets.

Obama also promised to stand with Turkey and Europe generally to stop the overwhelming flow of migrants. Nevertheless, speaking through Ben Rhodes, the English and Poly Sci major turned Obama foreign policy adviser, Obama (in common with the three Democrat candidates for president) has promised to continue unabated the flow of Middle Eastern refugees into the United States. To assuage people’s fears, however, the administration did promise that these refugees would be subject to “rigorous” vetting.